1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a contents providing apparatus and contents providing method which provide contents with a plurality of different coding formats.
2. Description of the Related Art
Video contents and audio contents are encoded according to coding formats used in respective nonlinear editors. In order to provide contents with plural types of coding formats by use of a contents providing apparatus, it is necessary to provide decoders which can cope with the respective coding formats. In a general contents providing apparatus, since one decoder board is directly connected to one output channel, it becomes necessary to physically replace a decoder board when the decoder board of a certain output channel has failed. Therefore, there occurs a problem that timing to reproduce contents is late.
There is proposed a method for nonlinearly editing a coding format without standardizing the coding formats even when contents with plural types of coding formats is provided together by using a multi-format decoder which can decode the contents with plural types of coding formats (for example, refer to the International Patent Disclosure No. WO00/51347).